Visiting Scarfolk, the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s
collectorsweekly.com
collectorsweekly.com
This diminished as the 80s went on, along with that sense of Orwellian paternalism that seemed to suffuse British life (see films like Scum, If..., The Offence) - Perhaps it was the shadow side of the "cradle-to-grave" era which ended with Thatcher - a welfare state administered by former aristocratic imperialists. I don't know. I was too young to have a handle on it, and like the creator of Scarfolk, the time has a kind of mythological existence for me.
The article mentions how the creator of Scarfolk was inspired by public information films. These were a source of pure terror to any kid who grew up in 70s-80s Britain.
Imagine you are watching something fun on childrens TV, then, out of nowhere a short horror film appears - only, as the authoritarian narrator reveals - this isn't fiction - this is real. You couldn't watch tv without the fear of some horrible thing being shown at random. There were certain times of day when they were more likely and you could feel the dread mounting as they approached.
Here's an example of the wholesome and educational material 80s kids were subjected to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWfOLN9Z1yw
This scared the crap out of me as a child. If you're at all interested in horror or propaganda then I highly recommend them! There are a bunch of them on youtube.
Children of the Stones stands out as memorable. Or is that for scarring a generation? :)
Scarfolk gets the mood, typography and graphics perfectly. I discovered it ages ago, forget it and get reminded every couple of years and catch up.
Over the course about 20 mins 6 kids playing on a farm are dispatched by falling into slurry pits, drinking chemicals and getting run over by tractors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMnb536WuC0
I could only have been about 6 or 7, and watched this between some cartoons. Scared the hell out of me. I didn't know how to "protect myself" from this menace so decided I'd just go and hide in the cupboard.
In my elementary school we didn't do "duck and cover" but we did have to regularly go down in lines to the basement which was an official "fallout shelter" of our city. In the mid-70s I remember being shown a film in school about a society living underground owing to some unexplained environmental catastrophe, and for her birthday a young girl is allowed to go aboveground in a spacesuit with a guide to explore an abandoned city. One of the scenes showed a museum with exhibits like "North American Squirrel - Extinct 1984".
In the early 80s there was a hullabaloo about a TV film showing the impact on Lawrence, Kansas, after a US-Soviet nuclear war. The pundits warned parents not to let kids watch it, yet we kids had grown up with the implicit threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads. Of course I watched it, and was not too surprised about what it I saw on the screen ...
The Day After http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085404/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
The one I remember most as a kid was actually the QED episode "A Guide to Armageddon":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA
Edit: The part starting around 6:40 gave me nightmares when I saw it...
The 1965 The War Game was so bad (i.e. realistic) that it wasn't broadcast until relatively recently:
It's a TV series of parody kids' educational films from the late 70s-80s. Immensely funny.
https://archive.org/details/british_gov_public_films
And if anyone thinks this is a joke, I remember watching these adverts as a child and thinking they really could work out what you were watching on the telly.
This has never been admitted officially:
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ73
Which is all extremely weird - because it means the BBC spent real money buying a few vans and kitting them out with fake buttons, lights, and switches. And then more real money driving them around the UK and parking them in random locations. To frighten people.
As for Scarfolk - found it a few years ago, thought it was hilarious. Technically it's an example of hauntology, which is borrowed from Derrida[1], but only really makes sense in the grimmer parts of the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hauntology_artists
[1] Obviously...
(I may be misremembering but I'm sure those ads were around in the mid-80s too.)
Frankly, I think it's implausible that detector vans were a complete hoax. The BBC undoubtedly had the technological capability to reliably and quickly locate TV sets. I do think it's plausible that the actual use of detector vans was overstated for PR purposes.
It would be one thing to detect an analog TV IF signal, another to triangulate its position precisely enough to identify a specific house in a street or room in a block - given that every other TV in the area would be generating exactly the same IF oscillator signal - and a third to prove the TV was tuned into a program and not being used for pong, a computer, or watching a video.
And it would be unnecessary. The licensing enforcers have always kept a record of addresses without a license. If - like me - you don't have a TV, you get a regular stream of letters threatening prosecution anyway, and an occasional knock on the door.
If you're an enforcer, the easiest way to check if someone has a TV is to look at a house after dark. Most living rooms in the UK are visible from the street.
How did you check?
TVL say they use detector van evidence as grounds for a search warrant, which seems perfectly reasonable. Why argue the technicalities of RF triangulation in court when you can just get a warrant, search the house and collect incontrovertible evidence?
If you look up the "Southern Gothic Meme" or "____ Gothic" memes (for your city, state, concept, etc) theres some really entertaining shortform writing out there. :)